An articulator is a mechanical device which provides a simplified geometrical model of the cranium for simulating the relative movements of the human jaws for testing occlusion of teeth. An articulator is used by a dental technician when modeling dental restorations for a patient, and the dental technician may alternate between modeling the restorations and evaluating the function of the bite or occlusion using the articulator. For testing collision of teeth in the upper and lower jaw, the dental technician can use carbon copy paper placed between the teeth of the two jaws in the articulator, and the colliding teeth will be thus colored, when the jaws are moved.
A facebow is a mechanical device which is used to register the relationship of the patient's maxillary arch in three planes of space and transfer this information into an articulator that can be adjusted to simulate the patient's jaw movements. The relationship is two-fold: to establish the functional relationship of the maxillary arch to the axis of rotation for proper function and to analyze the esthetic relationship of the maxillary arch to the patient's face for optimal esthetics.
Virtual articulators are digital representations of articulators and are well known in the art, for example from WO2011/103876 registered to the current applicant.
US2014/0067337 describes a method and system for providing patient data useful for dental procedures, including scanning a dental structure of a patient when coupled to a geometric structure to provide a virtual model representative of the coupling and the dental structure, and relating the virtual model to a body reference of the patient.
Previously, it has been necessary to take physical impressions of a patient's upper and lower jaws, and scan these physical impressions in order to obtain a digital dental model of a patient, which can be inserted into the virtual articulator.
It remains a problem to determine the relationship between a patient's upper and lower jaw and the hinge axis of the jaws, without the need for making physical models of the patient's dental structure.
It remains a problem to transfer a digital representation of the patients dental structure into a virtual articulator without the need for making physical models of the patient's dental structure.